Isometric experiments
I have been experimenting with pushing down with my shin/ankle/foot while kneeling to weight the stern for reverse moves. If you are heeling with both knees in the chines, (backed into the seat) then both feet are pitching the stern. Now add some pressure against the hull with your shins and you pitch back more.
It takes some concentration at first, but seems to work
Reverse Axle
– Last Updated: Dec-07-10 8:33 PM EST –
Marc was captured by aliens. We've just discussed a Reverse Christie, with the bow actively skidded out. How would one go about doing a Reverse Axle? Yes, this is a test.
Doubtful
All Christies require forcing the stern into a skid. I kinda doubt many of us have that much power to the blade with one forearm intersecting the other before that J kickout. I’ve seen a lot of supposed Cross Christies where the yaw couple is set prior and the paddler poses through the maneuver. That doesn’t score well this side of the pond. I always score it a goose egg, cause…
I was captured by aliens in Lake Luzerne
– Last Updated: Dec-07-10 8:14 PM EST –
and forced to build toboggans but that's another story. I've since been released.
Regarding the reverse christie, I believe it is the bow that skids out.
Now for the reverse axle.
This is an onside turn with the boat heeled toward the onside.
Traveling in reverse, the move is initiated with a reverse J. This gets the boat turning. The bow is skidding away from the paddle side, the stern turning (or appearing to turn) toward the paddle side. The paddle is then sliced back and placed abeam the paddler's hip. The power face is open. The move is concluded with a wide, choked up draw to the stern.
It's a great way to back away from a dock and impress the crowds as you gracefully turn around and head for open water.
Marc Ornstein
Its probably the handiest move to
back yourself out of a channel you should not have followed.
I do that in the Adirondacks regularly… paddle some side channel of the Oswegatchie and find out its a dead end and about four feet wide…backstroke out of there to the part thats twenty feet wide with sufficient room to do a uey.
Wow. Comments. Questions.
What a great thread. I hope the atheists and agnostics have been reading.
I hadn’t looked at this thread since posting my rant on the cross backstroke. I return to find that it actually caused someone to learn and use the stroke.
I think this demonstrates one of Marc’s goals–to demonstrate that there is a practical relationship between freestyle techniques and river paddling. It’s all a matter of which of the strokes will be the most efficient or powerful when currents, obstructions, waves and wind come into the picture. Then, you may have to adjust the timings, placements and velocities that you use in flatwater.
I had the opposite problem when taking up modern freestyle, the problem alluded to by Kim: my timings, placements and velocities were out of synch because I was mentally habituated to doing these kinds of things in moving water with current differentials. I still haven’t ironed all that out.
In response to a comment by Marc, I wasn’t exactly denigrating interpretive freestyle, though it sure sounded like it. It’s just that I think the freestyle mafioso sometimes oversell the product and clutter it up with too much Italian. It’s like I feel when I see basketball dunking competitions on ESPN Sports Center. I sometimes want to scream that dunking, while impressive and athletic and highly skilled, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient skill for a basketball player in the real game.
I thought Pete Blanc and Guideboat did a very incisive job of decribing the dynamics of ferrying in current and in explaining the torsional strength of the cross backstroke in current. To me, it’s posturally related to the more powerful turning effect of a cross axle vs. an axle.
Questions.
- I think efficient forward stroking is the most important and practical boat control skill. Is the “complete” forward stroke part of the FS curriculum? That’s my Italian for learning how to correct at the entry (C stroke), during the pull (pitch stroke), at the end (J stroke, C stroke), and during the recovery (Canadian stroke, loaded Indian stroke). If it’s not, I would recommend an entire afternoon course dedicated to teaching and blending all these methods of correction.
- Is moving sideways part of the curriculum? By this I mean sculling, inverse sculling, serial draws and serial pries. I think these are important and practical types of boat control in flat and moving water – core moves. But I have never seen them exhibited or taught in the particular FS classes I have taken. I watched Mike Galt inverse scull all over the Hillsborough River 25 years ago, and I still can’t do it. Maybe these are in the Omering course?
Mafioso…we haveta breaka youse legs
off at the knee.
Sideways travel is paramount. Not only is it effective practically, it can be an initiation of turns.
What do you mean by inverse sculling? Here we go with technobabble again. There are sculling draws and pries but I cant envision doing them upside down.
Yes the forward stroke is paramount . Charlie is in charge of that afternoon class.
http://www.freestylecanoeing.com/public_html/Events/FFS/FFS%20Class%20Information%20092320010.pdf
Of course that stroke should never be ignored in any class.
Inverse sculling
Well, if this move were in the core curriculum, we would know what to call it.
I’m talking about a continuous scull that moves the boat laterally to the off-side. A sculling pry? A prying scull? A backface scull?
And then there’s the off-side scull … and the off-side inverse scull, which may be mostly frou-frou French pastry. But Omer didn’t do off-side stuff, and I like pastry.
And then what happens when you move the sculling or inverse sculling placement further abow or astern? There’s a lot to learn about lateral movements.
it IS in the core curriculum
– Last Updated: Dec-09-10 1:38 AM EST –
if it was not presented to you, something went awry somewhere.
http://www.freestylecanoeing.com/public_html/Events/FFS/FFS%202011%20Course%20Summary.pdf
Pages 1 and 2.
(keep it up. We might make 200 even though Charlie and Marc seem to be taking a long winters nap.)
sculling pry
I find it much trickier than the sculling draw.
Ron Lugbill (Jon’s older brother) tried his best to teach me many years ago. I think the trick is to keep the blade angle very conservative, barely open and barely closed at least initially as you move the paddle forward and aft with a vertical shaft and the paddle shaft right up against the gunwale. Imagine that the blade is like a chisel and you are trying to take thin slices off of the side of the hull as you scull. If you start out with the blade angled too much to the current, the paddle tends to get “jammed” against the boat.
Once you get it going smoothly, you can open and close the blade angle a little more. You can also increase the blade excursion once you get the stroke balanced. It helps to raise the side of opposition (heel to the onside) as for a side slip.
Sculling pries and sculling draws are great to optimally position your boat within an eddy to get ready to exit it to set up an upstream ferry, jump on a surf wave, or get ready for an eddy exit turn into strong current.
One way to run rapids that do not require catching eddies or complex moves is to keep the boat pointing downstream and move it laterally to river left or river right using sculling draws and sculling pries (or cross sculling draws) as necessary in order to avoid obstacles.
The same thing can be accomplished to some extent with side slips using static draws and pries, but side slips require the boat to be moving faster than the surrounding current and they tend to “run out of steam” in all but shorter rapids. I’ll usually start with the static stroke and then begin sculling as needed when the boat speed equalizes with the current speed.
Forward and Sculls
– Last Updated: Dec-09-10 5:23 PM EST –
'not napping, but I do participate in Geezer Volleyball at the Olympic Center on Wednesday evenings plus I'm in shock. Lower Saranac froze solid last night! On the other hand, we're just five months away from paddle season 2011!
FS has quite an emphasis on the Forward Stroke in almost all it's variations because it's the stroke everyone uses say, 95% of the time, and one must have control of the Forward to initiate anything else reliably.
We do not spend much time on the In-Water recovery, Indian Stroke, because it is so inefficient; both slowing cadence and increasing drag. There are better ways to arrive at one's destination more quickly and with less effort.
We emphasis both Drawing and Prying Sculls in FreeStyle 1 because lateral, or abeam, movement is important. Both Sculls are best achieved as close to the hull as possible with a dead nuts vertical paddleshaft. One key to the scull is minimal blade bite as P Blanc suggests. Another is driving the scull with locked arms using Torso Rotation. Short, fast, movement is way more effective than longer, more languid strokes. Each scull movement should be less than 24" in length. 'Better to think 18" to keep the blade within John Winter's window. Fixing arm position encourages shorter sculls as Torso Rotation increases power and limits blade travel. Note we need to align our shoulders with the keel line onside or offside, than rotate past that "standard" to effectively use Torso Rotation to power sculls.
The Prying Scull is not any harder or less intuitive than the Drawing variation, it's just that we use it less. This is partly because the paddle can run into the hull if arms are not firmly locked. But, learn it we must, because when approaching shore or a dock we don't want the paddle between the boat and shore, it needs be on the other side of the boat in deeper water and where it won't pinch between boat and decking, so the prying scull is necessary.
There are Cross Prying and Drawing Sculls too. It would be shameful to switch hands on the paddle to move abeam towards the dock at the Naked Turtle!
Lateral movement is important when leaving or approaching shore or dock or offsetting to miss stumps, strainers and rocks. Off-season sculling can be observed on the tube, as politicians and pundits scull around hard facts and meaningful choices.
Sculling draws and prys are taught
in all the basic solo courses I teach and am involved with, not just in FreeStyle. Generally paddlers learn it shortly after a pushaway and a draw, and will never likely use those again after learning to scull. At FS symposiums, the sculling strokes are taught in Level 1, but have come up at later sequences if asked.
I use sculling draws and prys in my FS routines (infrequent routines!) and certainly see them used in many others. In most instances they are used as a positioning maneuver, and as so there are no “points” awarded for them in a competition.
Definitely handy and useful in all paddling venues.
Napping?
– Last Updated: Dec-10-10 9:39 PM EST –
Napping? I feel like I'm in a 3 month MBA program. I'm still pondering a set of instructions and suddenly everyone is on the other side of the boat paddling backwards from a reverse sitting position.
It sure gets easier in person doesn’t it
Texting about canoeing is never as good as watching it which is never as good as doing it and feeling good.
We’re just passing time till March. Or January. I think I will be canoeing in South Carolina at the end of January.
All done here. The lake seized up last night. Its been windy and wild for so long that I thought she would never freeze. Now it looks like grey velvet.
Glenn and other neophytes:
FS was based on the premise that students were already versed in the (at that time) Flatwater Canoe curriculum. Items such as the Forward stroke, sideslips, sculling, etc. were covered there. The real FS curriculum was never a stand-alone course but assumed a very heavy dose of basic skills prior to the individual FS curriculum. So, a core curriculum would include all the curricula previous to FS. One should remember that the early Freestylers were already advanced canoeists and instructors going in. The first FS courses had as prerequsite, the highest level flatwater canoe courses. The problem has been that a lot of folks want to run before they walk and so jump into FS without good basic skills to begin with. How many times have I said, “get a good forward and reverse w/correction before trying FS moves”? We teach paddlers who do not have the basic power strokes and they are doomed to poor FS maneuvers before they ever get to the Initiation.
Pag
In regard to your description of
skulling technique, I agree that the short, fast, arms locked approach is effective in moving water…I use it all the time. In quietwater I find, however, that a longer, more languid, slower stroke with a more aggressive blade angle is much more efficient. I can move my boat abeam away from the dock generally using half the number of strokes that the other technique employs and cover the same distance.
I will caveat this by saying that written verbal descriptions of what is considered fast/slow is relative to each paddler (your mileage may vary!) I find that students generally have much more success with skulls when they are slowed down, as the bite on the paddle and resulting boat movement become much more apparent, and they are more cognizant of the controlled paddle motion. Torso rotation is certainly still in the mix, though.
Sounds like we might have something to discuss in Florida!
Tracy
Relation of FS to other curricula
Pag has raised the issue of how the FS curriculum relates to other flatwater curricula, but it sounds as if he was talking in the past tense.
Could someone explain what the relationship is currently among the FS curriculum, other flatwater curricula, and moving water curricula. I suppose I mean the ACA curricula, about which I know little.
I have a general view that the complete paddler needs to learn elements that may be outside the scope of any curriculum. I have difficulty understanding why “freestyle” should be somehow different than “flatwater” paddling, other than to focus on the highly refined turning maneuvers that dominate the interpretive routines. Aren’t forward strokes, turn strokes, back strokes and sideslips taught in non-freestyle FW courses?
Then there is the question of moving water. I really don’t think paddling strokes can be divorced from moving water. That’s the funnest water, at least to me, and that’s the water where you really NEED the turns that are so emphasized in FS. My sense is that very basic turns, backstrokes and sideslips should be taught in a FW course, then the student should train in moving water to learn how to use them all in current and eddies, and only then return for advanced FS or more advanced WW.
How do the current ACA curricula interrelate?
Wanna Race?
I remember Tom Foster beating Mike Galt like a drum in a sculling “race” at the first LaLou in Mandeville.
We could schedule the race
back to back with the Giant Slalom. Hmmm, I wonder which will be more fun?
Marc Ornstein
Not napping,
– Last Updated: Dec-09-10 6:13 PM EST –
just sitting back and watching the fun. The idea was to get the discussion started, not to write a monologue. If I wanted to do that, I could have written a book. From the looks of things, all y'all (I'm getting ready for Florida) are doing a great job. I wonder who will post #200. It should be a worthy post, not just one for the record.
Marc